


somewhere between what you feel and what you know

by ellydash



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-12 15:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellydash/pseuds/ellydash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sue plans to outlive Will Schuester. Sue gets what she wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somewhere between what you feel and what you know

  
Once, after he tells her she can’t exercise her tyranny forever, Sue promises him:  _I will outlive you, William. I will render your grave marker unreadable with the soles of my Capezios._

The idea tickles her so much she actually orders a pair of tap shoes online. Men’s, not women’s, because high heels are for masochists with no priorities. They’re shiny black patent leather, just like the ones Sue wanted as a kid. 

She places them in the middle of her row of white Nikes on the closet floor. The unforgiving contrast is wonderful.

  
___

  
She has a routine. 

Sue snaps awake at quarter-to-six each morning, no alarm clock necessary; she’s fine-tuned her body to know and obey structure. A four-mile run down the block, up Sloan Hill, through the park and back around. Protein shake with raw egg to replenish. Shower. At school and in her office by seven-thirty to begin sketching out cheer battle plans. She wins her wars with perfected tension drops, quick tosses and dive rolls. 

McKinley High knows not to interrupt her during prep time. A Cheerio tried it once and disappeared. Sue likes to encourage the rumor that there’s a body wearing a red-and-white uniform bricked up behind her office wall, and she even believes it now, just a little.

She works methodically, with characteristic focus, until ten o’ clock. When Quinn Fabray doesn’t rap on her door for their meeting at precisely the turn of the hour, as she’s been instructed to do, as she’s done every day since she’s been reinstated as head cheerleader, Sue’s mood blackens instantly. 

The minute hand on her desk clock shakes to one past, then two, then three, and Q still isn’t in her office. She’s never been late before; she knows the consequences. 

At seven minutes past the hour, Sue is trembling with anger. It’s Schuester, she knows it, he’s got something to do with this unconscionable disruption of her routine. Quinn’s far too interested in her own self-preservation to miss a prep meeting for anything other than Will Schuester’s insistence. 

On her march towards the music room, Sue walks with her arms stiff, wide to each side like battering rams, and fells the hapless students who don’t see her in time. The impact of each collision feels like reassurance. 

She’s unprepared for what she finds, and any comfort she’d managed to gather up dissipates when she sees their faces. It’s all of them. Brittany and Santana in the back row, holding hands. That intolerable Berry girl looking like she’s won a role she doesn’t want to play; she’s sitting at the piano next to Finn Hudson, who’s hunched over against her. Kurt Hummel is holding the quitter Jones, who’s shaking with sobs. The wheelchair kid whose name she can’t remember with his arm around the Asian boy’s waist. Some awkward blonde kid she’s never seen with a mouth made for low-budget gay porn. The Asian girl, the one Figgins is so bizarrely terrified of, seems stunned.

It’s Quinn Fabray Sue turns to, though, Quinn who’s against the far wall next to a weirdly subdued Noah Puckerman, and Quinn stares back at her, defiant. Not speaking, not apologizing. 

“Q,” she says, slowly, with as much venom as she can summon. “You are ten minutes late for our meeting. You know I don’t brook subordination. If you can’t be bothered to be at my office on time, then I can’t be bothered to keep you as head cheerleader. You’re demoted. Effective immediately.”

“Fine,” Quinn retorts. “I don’t care.”

Sue gapes at her, and while she’s attempting to formulate an appropriately devastating response, Kurt Hummel speaks up.

“You didn’t hear yet?” he asks her. There’s something in his voice that makes her stomach turn over, and she  _knows_ , just like that. 

“No, prima donna,” she snaps, “no one’s told me anything, and if you don’t fill me in right now I’ll confiscate your Adam Lambert eyeliner collection and give it to the poors.  _Start talking_.”

Kurt stares at her, lips pursed, trembling, and when she opens her mouth to loose a flood of frustrated invective at him, it’s the Berry girl who speaks up, her eyes liquid with tears. 

“It’s Mr. Schuester,” Rachel Berry says, her chin high. “He died.”

Quinn wails at this and burrows her face into Noah Puckerman’s absurdly developed chest. The others, they keep looking at her, and the expectation on their faces is more than Sue can stand. Like they’re waiting for her to make it better, to soothe them, like she’s some sort of robotic mentor who can process 

( _it’s mr. schuester he died_ )

who can process this news and spit it back out at them in comforting platitudes. 

Hummel’s expression is different, it’s sorrow and something else, something like  _understanding_ , and she wants to hit him for his presumptuousness. 

When she speaks, it’s a perfect imitation of herself. “Tell me what happened.” 

“We don’t know,” Hudson mutters, wrapping an arm around Berry, who turns into him like she’s choreographed the movement. “No one’s told us anything. Mike was in Miss Pillsbury’s office early this morning when she got the call. Said she wouldn’t stop screaming.”

“Tarsiers tend to do that when cornered,” Sue says, automatically. 

There’s silence. She sees tears on Santana Lopez’s face. 

“Don’t you ever  _stop_?” Jones asks her.

___

  
Eleven-thirty. 

She sits at her desk and cannot stop Will Schuester from breaking in.

He swells up in her mind, filling it with his infuriating earnestness and his inappropriately emotional pedagogy, and she can feel a gap in the well of her shoulder where he rolled his head that time he danced for her. She curls her fingers into fists. She thinks of lawsuit threats, hallway combat, the Lindy Hop, fist bumps.

“It was a hit and run,” Kurt Hummel says from the doorway. He’s opened it. Without her permission. Worse, without her awareness. “I thought you’d like to know what happened. Can I come in, please?”

“I don’t know why Schuester dying makes you think you have any right to enter my office without prior invitation.”

“Miss Pillsbury came by the music room after you left. She said it happened this morning, on his way to school.” Hummel’s actually inside her office now, crossing over to the desk, and the audacity of it is preventing her from speaking. She looks away, over at a particularly impressive plaque with her name engraved four inches high. 

“I can’t – I can’t be in there right now. With everyone,” he continues. “I can’t do it. They’re crying and talking about him and what an amazing man he was and how inspiring and I can’t stop thinking about watching his back as he passes me blind in the hallway while Azimio’s got my wrist pinned against a locker.”

She looks back at him, her eyes narrow. “William was weak. You’re not someone who tolerates weakness.”

“ _Please_  don’t criticize him,” Kurt says, shakily. “Not right now. I know he had his faults. I don’t want to list them with you. I don’t hate him, not like you do. I just want to sit somewhere where I don’t have to hear his praises. Can I do that here?”

Sue nods, a small dip of her head, and Kurt sits in one of her chairs. He puts his hands over his face.

After a minute, she says, “I don’t hate him either. You’re not as bright as I thought you were if you can’t understand that.”

“Coach Sylvester – ” His voice is high with pain, slightly muffled through his fingers.

They sit together for a long time, and they do not talk.

Just before the lunch bell, Figgins’s voice over the PA system announces a special assembly, to be convened immediately, with all faculty and students reporting to the gymnasium. Sue has never thought of herself as common faculty, and she doesn’t have any urge now to consider herself included in that designation. It’s the last thing she wants right now, to listen to Figgy bumble telling the school about Schuester.

“Go find your friends.” 

Kurt looks up at her for the first time in twenty minutes.

“I don’t – ” he begins, and she silences him with a wave of her hand. 

“Kurt,” she says. “Go. Get out of here.”

Sue’s been saving up his first name like a talisman. It has the intended effect she’d hoped for: instantaneous obedience. Hummel grabs his bookbag and rushes out without further protest.

When the door closes behind him, she says again, into the empty room: “I don’t  _hate_  you.” 

It sounds to her ears like someone else speaking, someone weak and emotional and dangerously close to regret, someone Sue Sylvester has sworn she will never be. 

Her nails bite into her palms and the tips of her knuckles are white with restraint.

  
___

  
Two-thirty. 

Sue has never understood why the counselor’s office has glass walls. It seems to entirely defeat the point of anonymity. 

She expects it to be empty, the lights dimmed, maybe one of Emma’s perky floral decorative signs on the door reading SORRY TO HAVE MISSED YOU!, but she’s there. Finn Hudson’s there too, seated in one of the student chairs, hands over his face ( _just like Hummel_ , she thinks). 

When her curiosity pushes her towards the door, Emma glances up, and the empathy on her face, directed towards Hudson, dissipates. Sue pushes the door in. Hudson doesn’t look at her, doesn’t acknowledge her presence.

“I’m with a student right now, Sue,” Emma points out. “Can it wait?”

Sue pointedly ignores this request. “Why are you still here? I figured you’d take the rest of the day.”

“I left for a while,” Emma says, quietly, “after I talked to the kids. I’m his emergency contact. They asked me to identify him – ” She stops, takes a breath. “I came back because it’s my job. I’m a counselor. I need to be here for the students.”

“Bullshit. You came back here because you didn’t want to be  _alone_. Don’t hide that under some noble pretense.”

Emma’s face is white with anger. “Some of us actually care about these kids, Sue. Some of us actually care about Will. Don’t you dare try and pollute that.”

“Can you please just leave, Coach Sylvester?”

It’s Hudson. He raises his face from his hands and it’s red and mottled and ugly. 

“Look,” he tells her, and even though he looks like hell his voice is steady. “You make it worse, don’t you get that? You come in here and all you make me think of is how you did everything you could to make his life miserable. Maybe you’re even  _happy_ about this, I don’t know.”

“Finn,” Emma tries, but Hudson doesn’t stop. 

“Mr. Schue’s one of the best people I’ve ever known. He was there for me when no one else was. He loved us. We loved him. How many of your students can you say that about? Who’s ever felt that way about you? Nobody –”

Emma’s halfway to her feet. “Stop it, Finn.”

“Listen to me, Hudson, and listen good,” Sue says, low. “No matter how much you wish it’d been me in that car instead of Schuester, it wasn’t. He’s gone. You’re going to have to learn to live without him, and the sooner you acknowledge that and move on, the better off you’ll be.”

“I didn’t say I wish it’d been you,” Finn mutters. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Missed my point by a mile, Ryan Leaf.”

“Sue,” Emma breaks in. “I think you’ve helped enough.” The word  _helped_  is laced with just a touch of condensation, and it makes Sue want to scream. “Please leave.”

Before she turns, she sees Emma reach across the desk and take Finn’s hands in hers. 

  
___

  
Three-fifteen. 

None of the kids she shares with Schuester miss Cheerios practice. She lets the little wave of pride swamp her, an indulgence she rarely allows.

Q’s ponytail is a little lower and less tight than usual, but she’ll let it go, just this once. 

“AGAIN, INFANTS,” she bellows through the megaphone, after a somewhat better than mediocre execution. It doesn’t matter how well the routines go; Sue plans on pushing them until they collapse on the gym floor. Physical exhaustion overrules emotional exhaustion. This is her gift to them: a good night’s sleep. A few hours of forgetting.

  
____ 

  
When she visits Jean that night, Sue lies down next to her without speaking, curls into her sister and closes her eyes. 

Jean strokes her hair. Jean loves her the best way she can, with unconditional acceptance. Usually, it’s enough.

“Jeanie,” she begins, voice muffled against her sister’s nightgown. “Someone died today. Someone I work with. I didn’t really like him.” 

“Then why are you sad?” Jean asks her.

There are a lot of things Sue could tell her sister.  _Because those kids really loved him, and they’re good kids who don’t know how to handle this kind of pain. Because what I do for_ my _kids, the sharp blood and sweat of it, will never get me a tribute song or even a thank you. Because Kurt Hummel would rather sit silently in my office than let his friends comfort him. Because I have a pair of tap shoes at the bottom of my closet._

“He was my favorite target,” she says, instead.

“More favorite than Kathie Lee Gifford?” 

“Yeah. Worse hair. Vests. Sickeningly earnest.” 

“You hate vests. You told me they’re a sin.”

“A sin against logic and fabric patterns, that’s right.” Sue props herself up on her elbow and looks at Jean. “Don’t you ever wear one.”

Jean promises.   


  
___

 

Kurt opens his locker the next morning and finds a pair of men’s black patent leather tap shoes. No note, no explanation. He figures, after a quick survey of possibilities, that Miss Pillsbury must’ve decided he’d like something of Mr. Schue’s to remember him by. It’s kind of weird, but it’s kind of nice, too, like she’s saying he matters. 

They’re two sizes too big for him, but he can’t bring himself to take them down to the Goodwill. Kurt puts them on his closet floor, but in the far corner, behind a box of winter accessories, where he can’t see them. 


End file.
